Monday 13 August 2007 18.47 EDT
First published on Monday 13 August 2007 18.47 EDT

Another week, another fake. This time the West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service stepped up to the plate to accuse Channel 4's Dispatches programme Undercover Mosque of editing so misleading as to justify a criminal investigation and possible prosecution under the Public Order Act for publishing material "likely to stir up racial hatred". But having concluded they couldn't make a prosecution stick, they've asked Ofcom to investigate. BBC News 24 was hot for the story and ran it at the top of its bulletins as yet another example of TV fakery. But was the story, put out in a press release by the police and the CPS, true? Had the Muslim preachers featured in the documentary really been misquoted and taken so far out of context as to have "completely distorted what the speakers were saying"?

Had anyone asked the police for specific examples to justify their grand claim, as I did, they would have been left wanting. No further particulars are available apparently, and none have been given to Channel 4 or Ofcom. In fact, if the police press statement and the letters sent by them to Ofcom and Channel 4 (from the assistant chief constable responsible for "Security and Cohesion") are read more closely, it is pretty clear that the police are primarily concerned with community relations. They go out of their way to emphasise the point that they took investigating the actions of the programme makers - allegedly inciting racial hatred - just as seriously as investigating the extreme and illiberal comments of the preachers featured in the film. The local MP thinks the real story is why the police and CPS ducked the issue of prosecuting the extremists, and that the attack on the programme makers is just a smokescreen.

The issue of TV fakery is a big story - particularly in the silly season - but nowhere near as big a story as how the police appear to be trying to manage relations with Islamic organisations that for all their emollient words in public have within them people preaching serious bigotry and intolerance. It might also be a less significant story than the potential implications of the police and CPS contemplating criminal proceedings on the basis of journalists' editorial decisions - right or wrong.

Nevertheless the story ground on throughout the TV and radio day, focusing on the TV fakery question in spite of the unwillingness of the police and the CPS to produce a single piece of evidence to back up their claims. So keen were some - especially at the BBC - to pursue this angle that it was hard to avoid the feeling they were only too happy to see the misery of TV fakery shared around a bit. In fact, all those shown in the film voicing extreme views were offered a full right of reply before the programme was broadcast - which none of them took up - and, as a cursory viewing of the programme would have revealed, any comments they did make were fairly reflected in the programme's commentary. What's more when one of them was actually questioned on TV later in the day about what the film showed him saying, he couldn't deny saying any of it and more or less admitted to meaning most of it. All he could claim was that the "British security forces" had cleared him, and concluded that the programme makers were to blame for taking him "out of context". So at least the West Midlands Police appear to have scored a few points with their local extremists.

But back in TV land, surely it is time for some sense of perspective. Editing decisions can always be questioned, but the assumption that the programme makers must have behaved unethically just because the police and the CPS - who so clearly have their own agenda - say they have, is dangerous and wrong.